物理学史与哲学

What is the meaning of physical causal closure? Jaegwon Kim explicitly adopts a conception of causation according to which physical causation is effectively identified with deterministic physical lawfulness, and equates it with physical…

Prompted by misconceptions in the recent literature, we review the justifications for naturalness arguments and Occam's razor found in Bayesian statistics. We discuss the automatic Occam's razor that emerges in Bayesian formalism, bringing…

The year 2025 marked the centennial of quantum mechanics, inaugurated by Heisenberg's matrix formulation and the foundational contributions of Pauli, Schrodinger, and Dirac. Concurrently, 2026 marks the centennial of the Klein - Gordon…

This paper develops a conditional framework for understanding the emergence of measurable physical structure from a pre-metric domain. Contemporary physics provides powerful and precise descriptions of relations among already-defined…

Assembly theory (AT) introduces causation as a material property and establishes a metrology for objects produced by evolution and selection. The physical scale of causation is quantified by the assembly index, defined as the minimum number…

The term 'neutrinoless' is a cornerstone of modern particle physics, yet it defines a fundamental process by what is missing rather than what is created. We trace the origins of this privative neologism to a 1953 experimental claim and show…

During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…

I will discuss how the concept of basho, introduced by Nishida Kitaro nearly a century ago, can give an interesting insight to understand the concept of a point in modern quantum gravity. A quantum spacetime, necessary for the quantization…

String field theory is supposed to stand to perturbative string theory as quantum field theory stands to single-particle quantum theory; as such, it purports to offer a substantially more general and powerful perspective on string theory…

Henri Poincare Saint Louis lecture, delivered on 24 September 1904 at the International Congress of Arts and Science, occupies a distinctive place in the pre history of twentieth century theoretical physics. In this text, Poincare…

Standard formulations of supervenience typically treat higher level properties as point valued facts strictly fixed by underlying base states. However, in many scientific domains, from statistical mechanics to machine learning, basal…

We demonstrate that the system of fine-tuning constraints for life is, in a sense, overdetermined: the a priori probability of its feasibility is extremely low, especially in the chemical sector. This entails that the structure of the…

Yuri L'vovich Klimontovich (28.09.1924--26.10.2002) was an outstanding theoretical physicist who made major contributions to kinetic theory. On the occasion of his 100th birthday we recall his main scientific achievements.

Between 1933 and 1937, the treatment of relativistic spin-1/2 particles, initially rooted in Hole theory, evolved into the modern framework of quantum field theory. This paper reconstructs the crucial stages of that transition by examining…

In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…

Weatherall and Manchak (2014) show that, under reasonable assumptions, Reichenbachean universal effects, constrained to a rank-2 tensor field representation in the geodesic equation, always exist in non-relativistic gravity but not so for…

[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding…

E. T. Whittaker produced two papers in 1903 and 1904 that, although sometimes considered mere mathematical statements (Barrett, 1993), held important implications for physical theory. The Whittaker 1903 paper united electrostatic and…

Speculation about Martian canals was a recurring feature of late nineteenth-century popular astronomy. This paper examines how colonial newspapers used humour to negotiate the epistemic uncertainty and interpretive excess associated with…

Between 1875 and 1899, Mars occupied a prominent and recurring position in newspaper reporting across Europe, North America and beyond. Although the scientific and cultural dimensions of this "Mars excitement" have been well studied in…